[5]

This haunted hotel room flick, based on a short story by Stephen King, brings nothing new to the haunted house subgenre. It even veers straight into cliches like dramatic temperature changes, ghostly images of murders past, and (my favorite) the paintings that change. I know it must be hard to breathe new life into a tired formula, but screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, People vs Larry Flynt) should at least know better than to include anything you could find at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

If you don’t mind retreading familiar ground, however, 1408 is well put together and fairly well paced. I’d have preferred if director Mikael Hofstrom took a more stylized approach to the material and left off the (why do they still do this?) final scare moment. John Cusack does a decent job. His early scenes with Samuel L. Jackson are the best in the movie.